Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | sfeng's comments login

If you’re a Cloudflare shareholder, Kenton has increased your net worth quite a bit. He is one of the few people who is so unreasonably capable he can and has changed the direction of a multibillion dollar company single handedly. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s not in this particular case.

I’m also fairly convinced he didn’t capture one tenth of one percent of the value he created, so I’m not sure how anyone can argue this is ‘unfair’.


As someone that was previously bullish on Workers but now fully disillusioned with a barely positive cost basis on it right now I disagree with this - if anything I feel burned for believing and continuing to believe.

Either way, people like me aren’t going to be able to capture even a tenth of the success of joining Google in 2005 or buying a $1m house in Palo Alto ~4 years after graduating (I’m 6.5 years out of graduating) because people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house.


Take it easy. These kind of thought won't help you. It's a rough time out there but thing change. Our ancestors survived famines and war. We should be able to manage this.

And yes, life is not fair. But don't waste it, it's finite.


"people like me aren’t as human as the folks that own this house"

What do you mean? People aren't human if they do not have a certain level of wealth?

Seems to imply that you may think people with less wealth aren't valuable or even human. What should people with less wealth than you feel?


My net worth is temporary, theirs and their status is not.


If you are a SCUBA diver, but always wished that diving was a bit more technical and rigorous, I highly recommend trying cave diving [1]. You can do a cenote tour in just an afternoon, and if you’re hooked a few weeks of training (spaced over time) will make you into a radically better diver.

1- https://www.underthejungle.com/en/cave-cavern-training/


They lost me at dropping hot oil. There is no evidence of anyone dropping oil, it would have been expensive and hardly better than boiling water.


We have historical evidence of using hot oil, especially pitch (which is "oil" in the sense of petroleum, not plant oil), e.g. see [1], which provides academic sources.

If we go beyond Medieval Europe, using hot oil was observed by Josephus in AD 67 [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/26l4ae/was_b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_thermal_weapons#Hot_oil


Imagine being under siege and dropping pitch on someone.

Give it 8-or-so years and they'll be in real trouble



Where in Scotland? There’s 5G almost everywhere.


5G almost everywhere? In Scotland?

I respectfully beg to differ. There are massive chunks of Scotland which have no cellular reception at all. There are many places where there is service from some-but-not-all providers. Of those places, there are a few where the service is glacial in performance.

Example: if you stop at The Green Welly Stop in Tyndrum (FK20 8RY), you'll have coverage from only two of the mobile networks. Vodafone and o2 have a coverage patch there. Have a look at the coverage maps (bidb.uk aggregates them all). It's absolutely patchy, and certainly not contiguous.


Those brick heaters are smart because they use electricity at off-peak times to heat the house for the whole day. What about it strikes you as less efficient than any other direct electric heating?


They're pretty dreadful in that they leak heat while charging up during the night, using (still-expensive) off-peak electricity, when you don't really need the heat, then run out of stored heat quickly during the day, failing to do their job. Maybe in a heavily insulated building they would work better - just my personal experience before ripping them out to install gas central heating.


They’re a suboptimal version of a boiler heat pump.

https://electrek.co/2022/01/05/these-new-affordable-electric...


They don't work particularly well. You're roasting in the night when they heat up, nice and toasty at breakfast, but by the time you're back from work in the evening you're sat in the cold.


What’s your definition of finicky? JavaScript is something like 3-10x faster than Lua for most benchmarks (1). If you’re referring to the event loop, it shouldn’t be all that relevant for singleminded code like this that is only processing a single event every half second. If you’re referring to mathematical oddities, it is also not relevant as JavaScripts love of floats is well suited here.

1- https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/amp/lua-v...


Thanks for the enlightenment, I can see I have to work on my understanding of JS a bit more .. I did not know that it surpassed Lua in terms of performance. I guess Mike Pall is sorely missed.


Canard aircraft, for example, stall the canard first, resulting in the nose dropping, preventing the main wing from ever stalling.


The main wing can still be stalled in a canard; it’s not easy but it is possible and when it happens it’s almost unrecoverable because the canard will be stalled too and no flying surfaces will have sufficient lift to correct the condition. It’s a condition called “deep stall”


IIRC non-canard aircraft can have this happen when the stall causes the plane to fall at an angle where the wake turbulence of the wings covers the elevators.


Usually in a cross-controlled “slip” where the fuselage is held at a fairly dramatic angle relative to the slipstream (relative wind) and the fuselage “blanks out” one side of the main wing.


This is far from universally true. The Saab 37 Viggen fighter jet (which was also the first series produced canard aircraft) is capable of departing from controlled flight into a stalled attitude in no less than five different ways, according to its flight manual:

> If the angle of attack exceeds the permitted limits, some yaw disturbances appear around alpha 25-28°, and at alpha 28-30° there are weak pitch-up tendencies. If the stick is moved forward to counter the pitch-up, the aircraft returns to normal alpha, possibly after overshooting up to alpha ~50°. Note that the angle of attack instrument only shows the area -4° to +26°.

> If the stick movement forward at the pitch-up is too small or is made too late, such that the angle of attack does not immediately decrease, the aircraft departs into superstall or spin. If the pitch-up occurs without aileron input, the departure usually results in superstall. If the pitch-up occurs with any aileron input active, the aircraft is affected by adverse yaw and the likelihood of a spin increases.

In addition to the superstall, the aircraft has two spin modes, in the flight manual referred to as flat and oscillating. The difference is basically the rotation speed and if there are oscillations in pitch and/or roll or not. The recovery is pretty conventional:

> In superstall or spin the pitch authority is good, which eases recovery. Aileron input results in adverse yaw, that is to say rolling right gives a yaw to the left and vice versa. Rudder authority is negligible.

> Recovery from superstall and oscillating spin is accomplished by moving the stick to a position somewhat forward of the neutral pitch position, with ailerons and rudder neutral. To recover from a flat spin, the yawing rotation must be stopped first, which is accomplished with neutral pitch and full roll input in the direction of the rotation ("stick into the spin"). When the rotation has just about ceased, recovery is accomplished with neutral ailerons and the stick somewhat forward of neutral, just like when recovering from superstall and oscillating spin.

In addition to regular stalled attitudes though, the aircraft also exhibits another stalled attitude with autorotation, the "plunging spiral" (sv. störtspiral) which can also be encountered in two variants. I'm honestly not sure how exactly it works aerodynamically. The flight manual says:

> In certain adverse dynamic scenarios, the aircraft can enter an uncontrolled attitude of the autorotating type, here called plunging spiral . The plunging spiral, which can be either right side up or inverted, is considered to be the potentially most dangerous form of uncontrolled flight that has been discovered during the spin tests of aircraft 37.

> The most common form of the plunging spiral is the inverted one. The following attitudes/maneuvers repeatably result in an inverted plunging spiral: 1) somersault into inverted position from oscillating spin (for example while attempting to recover from a spin with the stick fully forward), 2) stalling the tailfin through so-called "knife edge flying". The inverted plunging spiral is characterized by: 1) negative load factor (-1 to -3 G) 2), low nose, 3) very high rate of rotation in the roll axis (≥ 200°/s), 4) high sink rate (≥ 150 m/s).

> Moving the stick back and/or aileron input to either side tends to increase the rate of the roll rotation. The rotation can be stopped by moving the stick fully forward with no aileron input. When the rotation has ceased, the stick is moved back to neutral pitch, and the aircraft recovers to controlled flight.

> The aircraft only departed into a non-inverted plunging spiral on a few occasions during the spin tests. It has not been possible to define any repeatable attitude or maneuver that results in a non-inverted plunging spiral. During the spin tests the non-inverted plunging spiral only occurred on the following two occasions (not repeatable): 1) when recovering from an inverted superstall, 2) when recovering from an oscillating non-inverted spin. The non-inverted plunging spiral is characterized by: 1) positive load factor (+1 to +3 G), 2) low nose, 3) very high rate of rotation in the roll axis (≥ 200°/s), 4) high sink rate (≥ 150 m/s).

> In a non-inverted plunging spiral, aileron inputs have no effect. Instead, the roll rotation must be stopped by pulling gently back on the stick until the rotation ceases. When the rotation has ceased, the stick is moved forward to the neutral pitch position and the aircraft recovers into controlled flight.


I would love to see this benchmarked against just running LZW compression on a list of the moves. I think the repeated nature of the moves means the entropy is actually rather low. It should be possible to come up with a compression dictionary which can save a lot more space than just a tight packing like this.


LZW would do very badly on a list of binary chess moves.

Huffman (and even more so arithmetic encoding or ANS (asymmetric numeral systems [0]) would be significantly better, if you're careful how you encode data.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_numeral_systems


Or a trained zstd dictionary.


> the repeated nature of the moves

On a single game? I don’t think the goal is to pack all plays together and unpack them every time. Every game must be individually accessible as I understand.


Sure but an $800M investment is supposed to pay off over 10-20 years. It seems like the industry will change in more like 1-2.


Yeah that’s fair.

I wouldn’t want to be in that biz right now


It would probably be useful to actually read before you comment. He meticulously cites the sources of his claims with actual studies.


>”…My take away is that there is addiction but it’s drastically overestimated”

It goes on and on. The author is ignorant.


Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: